Houston civil rights icon Lawson honored in D.C.

The Rev. Bill Lawson and other early civil rights activists were celebrated Thursday at a luncheon in the Washington Convention Center.

WASHINGTON - A civil rights icon from Houston, the Rev. Bill Lawson, was honored with other pioneers of the nationwide movement on Thursday by political and civil rights leaders gathered in the nation's capital for a luncheon and the dedication of the memorial to slain civil rights champion the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Lawson, founding pastor of Houston's Wheeler Avenue Baptist Church in 1962, became close to King during the early days of the civil rights movement when his church sponsored a local appearance by King and served as home to the Houston chapter of King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

The luncheon is "a major honor to me," Lawson said. "People who came along in '60s are old like I am. We look back on transformation from a segregated nation to a nation not entirely unsegregated, but we can celebrate the progress we've made."

The dedication, which was scheduled for Sunday, was postponed indefinitely because of Hurricane Irene.

Lawson, 83, a contemporary of King's, said he shared King's commitment to having churches take on a responsibility for helping people in the local community. "Worshipping God is not complete unless you help your neighbor," Lawson said. "That theology drew me long before I knew of civil rights.''

The luncheon honoring early civil rights activists drew hundreds of paying guests to the cavernous convention center in the nation's capital to hear Attorney General Eric Holder, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Houston, former Georgia state Sen. Julian Bond and the Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr., among others, describe the impact that the civil rights movement has had on their lives and the nation.

Holder said both he and President Barack Obama had been beneficiaries of the civil rights movement clearing away hurdles to advancement to the pinnacle of power in the United States.

Jackson Lee, who worked in the summer of 1970 for King's SCLC in South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi and Alabama while attending Yale, said she had taken up the "tools of the law" to shape and implement social change and to litigate injustices.

"We expect somebody else to do that," Jackson Lee said. "But we must do it ourselves; we must never give up on what is justice."

Galvanized by students

Lawson recalled that contacts with activist students while serving as director of the Baptist Student Union and a professor of Bible at Texas Southern University had galvanized his drive for civil rights in Houston. Lawson and his wife raised money to bail out 14 TSU college students who had been arrested for staging a civil rights sit-in to protest segregation at a Weingarten's lunch counter in Houston.

"At the time I had a hard time understanding why they would take risks," Lawson recalled. "Then I realized the strength of their convictions. It was necessary even if they had to risk arrest. They had the modern 20th century notion that it was time for justice in the nation."

When King visited Houston in 1963, Lawson said none of the African-American churches would host him because FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had labeled King of being a communist. King was "not very popular, but we invited him to our church," Lawson recalled for an account compiled by Rice University.